Beacon Hill received a brief mention in the New York Times today:
The deep recession, with its lost jobs and falling home values nationwide, poses another kind of threat: to the character of neighborhoods settled by the young creative class, from the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Beacon Hill in Seattle. The tide of gentrification that transformed economically depressed enclaves is receding, leaving some communities high and dry.
It’s a bit odd, because Beacon Hill doesn’t actually seem to fit the pattern described in the article, of neighborhoods gentrified by “the young creative class” and then finding their new hipster shops and cafés collapsing from the effects of the recession. Beacon Hill is still a neighborhood seemingly on the verge of gentrification, but we haven’t yet seen an influx of shops “playing the Decemberists in a continuous loop,” as the Times puts it. We have a couple of newish coffee shops, and a couple of newer businesses that might have been on the cutting edge of gentrification up here, but, honestly, it sounds more as if the Times meant to name-check Georgetown.
Hmm, do you think they meant Capitol Hill? Out-of-towners always mess up the hills.
How weird is that? Great find.
Not sure what the Times’ intention was, but we’ve come a long way baby! We’ve got a yoga studio, coffee shops and a bike lane. Hell, we just finally got a decent library in the last couple years! BeHi is certainly getting gentrified.
Yeah, sounds like they meant Georgetown to me. The again, as my friend who lives in Gerogetown likes to remind me, we all live in “Georgetown Heights.”
This is a riot. Obviously Scott Timberg has never been to Beacon Hill. So much for NYT fact-checking!